“I felt guilty, for sure,” Campana said, describing his initial hesitation. He said he had absorbed the idea that fathers should provide mainly by working. Taking leave gave the family time to adjust without worrying about losing income, he said, and helped ensure his wife was not handling the transition alone.

His experience reflects a notable change in California’s paid family leave program: Men accounted for 51% of bonding claims filed in 2025, surpassing women for the first time since the program launched in 2004. Men made up about 18% of claims when it began.

California’s program provides eligible parents up to eight weeks of paid leave within a year of a birth, adoption or foster placement. The bonding benefit is separate from paid disability leave available to mothers recovering from childbirth. In 2025, California increased the share of wages workers could replace while on leave; benefits can now replace as much as 90% of a worker’s regular pay, depending on eligibility.

Molly Weston Williamson, policy director for the advocacy group Paid Leave for All, said changing views of fathers’ roles, greater awareness of the program and improved benefits may all be contributing to the rise. California’s data, however, cannot establish why the claims changed. It reflects people who used the state program, not all parents who took leave through private employers or other arrangements.

The increase is not limited to California. Fathers also accounted for more bonding claims than mothers in Colorado and Washington, according to a 2026 report from Paid Leave for All. Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have enacted paid family leave programs; the federal government does not guarantee paid parental leave.

Research has associated paid parental leave with better health outcomes for parents, lower odds of postpartum depression and lower infant mortality rates. The state claims data alone do not show whether those outcomes have changed in California.

Families are also weighing the cost of raising children. Seven in 10 Americans said in a 2025 survey that raising children had become unaffordable, the largest one-year increase since the survey began more than a decade ago. A separate Pew Research Center survey found that 84% of full-time working parents who were not self-employed considered paid parental, family or medical leave extremely or very helpful, while about half said it was available to them.

For Campana, the time mattered in practical and personal ways: caring for three children under 4, sharing the work at home and being present with each child as a baby. He said that after growing up with a father who worked three jobs, he wanted to be there for his own children.